by David Peace
You drop your pen, your ink-dry-pen. You open your eyes, your red-dry-eyes. The eleven candles have gone, the Black Gate has gone, the Occupied City has gone. You are standing in a shed, or a barn, with the earth-smell, the damp-smell. You are watching an elderly man opening up cardboard boxes, taking out files, dust-webbed and cob-covered, the elderly man leafing through papers and documents, documents and notebooks, notebooks upon notebooks –
‘It was many years ago,’ the old man is saying. ‘Not so many people left now who remember what the Teigin case was really like.
‘But I remember. Because I was in the Murder Room; Room #2 of the First Investigative Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board. And Room #2 was in charge of all murders.
‘The head of our division was Suzuki and the head of our room was Minegishi…
‘But you want to know what happened, yes?’ repeats the old man. ‘No? You want to know the truth? Make up your mind! Which do you want to know; what happened, or the truth? What do you mean they’re the same? Of course they’re not! I can believe something happened, but it doesn’t make it true –
‘Does it?
‘For example, I once knew this detective. Married. Kid. The whole deal. Anyway, this detective, he starts to believe his wife is having an affair. A fling. With an American. A soldier. She wasn’t. But that didn’t stop him believing she was. He would tell me, last night my wife was off fucking this American soldier. She wasn’t. But that didn’t stop him believing it. Believing it happened. Believing it was real. Believing it was true. It was the truth for him. It was real for him, very real for her too, in the end. But that’s another story. But you see my point, don’t you? But, anyway, if you want to know what happened, then I’ll tell you what happened. It’s all in here …
‘Here in these boxes, here in these notebooks …
‘But remember, no more tears –
’No more tears for him …
The Second Candle –
The Testimony Notebook of a Detective, H.
The city is a notebook. In pencil and on paper,
in blunt pencil, on coarse paper –
IN THE OCCUPIED CITY,
I wrote these words:
1948/1/26; 16.00: Snow / Day-off / In the public bath / The call from Metro HQ / ‘Ten dead in the jurisdiction of the Mejiro Police Station.’ / ‘Another Yakuza war?’ / ‘Much bigger. Mass poisoning. Report immediately!’ / Trolley bus from Naka-Meguro to Ebisu / Taxi to the crime scene / The Shiinamachi branch of the Teikoku (Imperial) Bank, 39 Nagasaki 1-chōme, Toshima-ku, Tokyo / A one-storey building / Across from the Nagasaki Shrine / Hell / Ten bodies laid out in a line in one of the maintenance man’s two rooms / Eyes open / Mouths open / Blood and vomit / Chalk marks where they were found / Behind the counter / In the washroom / In the hallway / In the maintenance man’s living room / Six survivors taken to the Seibo Catholic Hospital / Doctors, neighbours, and journalists inside the bank / Crime scene contaminated / Evidence destroyed or misplaced / My room – Room #2 (Murder Room) of the First Investigative Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board – provisionally assigned the case.
The First Period (the first twenty days of the investigation; 26 January to 14 February, 1948) begins –
1948/1/26; 23.00: The second floor of Mejiro Police Station / Special Investigation HQ established / First meeting of the Special Investigation Team / Report based on evidence gathered at crime scene and statement taken from one of the survivors / Establishment of known facts / Two of the six survivors now dead / Victims now total twelve / Survivors four / Date and time of the crime: Fifteen minutes around 3.30 p.m., 26 January (Monday) 1948 / Place of the crime: Within Shiinamachi branch of Teikoku Bank, 39 Nagasaki 1-chōme, Toshima-ku, Tokyo. This establishment, formerly Fujita Pawnshop and consisting of one building with three entrances, is situated between the business and residential quarters in front of Nagasaki Shrine about sixty metres northeast of Shiinamachi Station on Seibu Agricultural Line (formerly called Musashino Line) / Victims: Yoshida Takejiro (43), now being under treatment, of 812 Oguchimachi, Ota-ku; Watanabe Yoshiyasu (43), died, of 758 Oizumimachi, Itabashi-ku; Nishimura Hidehiko (38), died, of 10 Shin Ogawamachi 2-chōme, Ushigome, Shinjuku-ku; Shirai Shoichi (29), died, of 519 Asagaya 3-chōme, Suginami-ku; Sawada Yoshio (22), died, of 449 Fujisawa, Fujisawa-mura, Irima-gun, Saitama Prefecture; Tanaka Tokukazu, being under treatment, of 793 Kami-ochiai 2-chōme, Shinjuku-ku; Akiyama Miyako (23), died, c/o Akiyama Kunosuke, 18 Nagasaki i-chōme, Toshima-ku; Uchida Hideko (23), died, of 5 Kita Toyotama, Nerima-ku; Akuzawa Yoshiko (19), being under treatment, c/o Akuzawa Shobei, of 14 Nagasaki i-chōme, Toshima-ku; Kato Teruko (16), died, of 1-713 Ikebukuro 2-chōme, Toshima-ku; Takeuchi Sutejiro (49), died, of 170 Horikiri-chō, Katsushika-ku; Takizawa Tatsuo (46), servant, his wife Ryu (49), his daughter Takako (19) and son Yoshihiro (8), all of them died, all of them resident of Shiinamachi branch of Teikoku Bank / Offender: Name and address: unknown / He said he was a medical member of Sanitary Section, Tokyo Metropolitan Office and of Welfare Dept, Welfare Ministry, and had a title of Doctor of Medicine / Presented name-card: ‘Yamaguchi Jiro MD; Technical Officer; Ministry of Health & Welfare.’ / Description: Aged between forty-four and fifty, about five feet three inches in height, rather thin, with oval face, high nose, pale complexion, hair cut short or rather long and grizzled / Appearance: Dressed in a lounge suit (brown, figured weave, not new); with an overcoat or spring coat on arm; wearing brown rubber shoes (not certain); a white cloth band on left arm (which had on it the mark of Tokyo Metropolitan Office in red, and under the mark was written in black and good hand ‘Leader of Disinfecting Team’ or ‘Disease Preventative Doctor’ / Articles possessed by the offender: A metal box, about 3 cm x 15 cm in size, such as often carried by doctors (he took the poison out of this box); one small and one medium-sized glass medicine bottles (holding poison) / Characteristics: Two brown spots 1.5 cm long on left cheek (not scars of burns or boils, but such as often seen on the skin of an old man). A handsome man; well composed and looking like an intelligent man / Brief account of the case: The victims opened their business as usual at 0930 hrs, and after Ushiyama Senji, their manager, went home with stomachache about 1400 hrs, continued at their work till 1500 hrs, when they closed the front door and began winding up the remaining affairs for the day / At approximately 1530 hrs the offender made his sudden appearance at the side entrance and, showing his name-card (printed with false title, as described above) to Akuzawa Yoshiko, one of the victims, expressed his wish to see the chief. So the latter showed him into the office-room, and Yoshida Takejiro, the assistant chief, had a talk with him / According to the statement of the offender, there have cropped up a number of dysentery cases among those who drink the water of a public well in front of Aida’s, and have been reported to Lieutenant Porton (or something sounding like that) as well as to the Japanese police. So a disinfecting team of the Allied Forces was coming, he said. He himself was dispatched by the lieutenant in advance of the said team to make an investigation, as a result of which he found that an inmate of the house of a dysentery sufferer had visited their office on the day. In accordance, everything in the office, including the books, papers, banknotes, etc., must receive a disinfecting process, for which nothing should be carried out till the arrival of the disinfecting team, he declared / When Yoshida said to him: ‘How can you have got the knowledge so soon, I wonder?’ the offender said in reply: ‘In truth, the doctor who made an inspection of the sufferer has made a direct report to the Occupation authorities.’ / ‘The disinfecting team will soon be here,’ continued the villain, ‘and in the meanwhile you all must take this medicine given us by the Occupation authorities. This is a medicine so powerful and effective as to make you absolutely immune from the dysentery if you take it.’ So saying, he took some phials, large and small, out of his medicine chest (a metal chest for a medical practitioner, as described above) / All the victims, wholly unsuspicious of the fiendish intention of the offender, whose
perfect composure and plausible explanations as well as his armband of Tokyo Metropolitan Office having satisfied them to lay full credit in his words, formed a circle around him – a circle of poor victims sixteen in all / Then the devil opened his mouth and said: ‘This medicine will injure the enamel of your teeth, and so I will show you how you must swallow it. Do as I am going to show you. There are two kinds of medicine. Take the second about a minute after you take the first. Be sure to drink it within a minute, or you will get a bad effect.’ / After such explanations he poured into the victims’ cups some liquid medicine, transparent and otherwise, out of the small phials with a fountain-pen filler, a filler for each / Then he took a cup of his own in his hand, and, saying, ‘This is how to drink,’ gulped its contents by dripping them drop by drop on to his tongue, which he had put out in the form of a shovel / So the poor victims, without exception, gulped the fatal water following the devil’s example / The liquid in question had a burning taste, and the victims got a feeling as if they had taken some strong whisky / After about a minute, the tricky villain again showed them how to drink the second medicine, and again the poor innocents followed his example, not suspecting in the least that they were actually killing themselves / The devil had the audacity to advise them to rinse out their mouths so as not to injure their teeth, and they went to have some water at the tap several metres off in the passage / Just about this time they felt themselves suddenly overwhelmed with torpor, and fell one by one in the office-room, passage, matted-room etc., sinking into a complete comatose state / As a natural conclusion, nobody knows – but the devil and God – what the offender did after his victims fell senseless / SOME RULES FOR CI AGENTS TO ACT UPON: (1) Send warnings without delay to banks, post offices, and other places where large sums of money are handled, not to fall easy victims to some similar attempts. Institute at the same time a close investigation as to whether such attempts have been made in the past. (2) Make an immediate inquiry as to where the offender’s name-card was printed, carrying your search into every corner of the Metropolis where some printer of name-cards may have printed some such items. (3) Make an immediate inquiry as to whether there lives some suspicious person at all similar to the description given of the fiendish offender, within the area you are assigned to cover. Pay a special attention to bank employees, disinfecting officials and their assistants, health officials and their men, physicians, druggists, and those who have some record of having been employed in the sanitary work of the Occupation authorities. (4) Examine any person, at all suspicious, more strictly than ever, paying a special attention to his name-card, phials, and medicine chest, made of metal. (5) Try and catch some clue concerning those who may have some business or other connections with the bank in question. (6) Ransack your memory and memoranda for some person with criminal records (especially fraud), at all resembling the devilish offender described, either in his features or in his peculiar way of committing crimes. (7) Carry out a secret surveillance over the daily habits and characteristic features of the Metropolitan health officials and such others as are engaged in sanitary works in the Metropolis / Insert: Memorandum from Director of Criminal Department, Metropolitan Police Board, to Chiefs of All Police Stations, Re: Instructions regarding Case of Killing Members of the Teikoku Bank: At approximately 15.30 today, the sixteen members of the Shiinamachi branch of the Teikoku Bank, located within the jurisdiction of the Mejiro Police Station, were asked by a man who called himself a member of the Sanitary Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Office to swallow a liquid poison he brought which he said was a preventative against dysentery to be taken by them according to an order issued by the Occupation Forces, that ten of the victims were killed on the spot and two at the hospital, and the other four are being given medical aid but their fate is still to be seen. This crime, which was committed at the closing hour of the bank and in the assumed name of the Occupation Forces, killing many lives at one time and attempting to rob much money of the establishment, is one of the rarest and boldest crimes ever seen in the history of crimes. In view of the tremendous repercussion being shown by the public with regard to this case, we must, through cooperation of all police, take greatest possible efforts for apprehending the offender. For this reason you are asked to recognize the extraordinary importance of the case and, giving complete instructions to your subordinate officers in accordance with the following rules of investigation, make immediate report to the investigation headquarters whenever you get any data for furthering investigation and that with special care not to let the secret escape. Details of Place of the crime, Victims, Offender and Brief account of the case attached / N.B. Your speedy written report is impatiently expected at the Investigation Headquarters as soon as your task is completed / Memorandum ends / One hundred detectives assigned to the case / My room – Room #2 (Murder Room) of the First Investigative Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board – confirmed in overall charge of the investigation under my boss, Detective Inspector Minegishi / Minegishi to report to Chief Inspector Suzuki, Head of the First Investigative Division, who in turn will report directly to Tokyo Chief of Police Kita / Robbery Room detectives to aid in investigation / Divided into three ji-dōri questioning teams / Partnered with Detective Fukushi / Allotted Nagasaki 2-chōme / Begin questioning the neighbourhood at first light.
1948/1/27; 06.00: Fair, with northwesterly winds / Street by street, house by house, door-to-door questioning of Nagasaki 2-chōme neighbourhood with Fukushi-kun / Establish names and occupations of all residents / Establish and verify whereabouts of each resident at time of crime / Repeat description of suspect based on statements of survivors / Note down any possible sightings of men fitting description of suspect / Note down any suggestions as to identity of suspect based on description given to residents / 18.00: Requested to return to Special Investigation HQ for emergency meeting / Reports received of two similar cases / First case reported to the Marunouchi Police Station at 15.30 this afternoon by Ogawa Taizo (or Yasuzo), the manager of the Nakai branch of the Mitsubishi Bank / Case occurred at approximately 15.20 on 19 January this year at the Nakai branch of the Mitsubishi Bank at 4-chōme Shimo-ochiai, Shinjuku-ku / According to the statement by Ogawa, a man arrived at the bank as business was closing and presented the name-card: ‘Dr Yamaguchi Jiro, medical technician attached to the Anti-Epidemic section of the Welfare Ministry’ / The visitor told Ogawa that he had been sent by a Lieutenant Porter or Parker to disinfect the entire branch because money had been deposited that day by a man named Ōtani from the Kinuhara Industrial Company of 4-chōme Shimo-ochiai / The visitor said that a mass dysentery outbreak had occurred in the employee apartments of the Kinuhara Industrial Company that day (19 January) with ten patients reported so far / Ogawa asked the man if he knew the full name of this Ōtani but the man did not answer clearly / Ogawa investigated the records of the branch and found a deposit by a man named Ōtani of the Kinuhara Industrial Company / However the deposit had been a postal order for ¥65 and not cash / Ogawa presented the postal order to the visitor / The visitor then took out a bottle of transparent, colourless liquid from his briefcase / The man sprinkled a small amount of the liquid over the postal order and the ledger / Ogawa asked the man if he wished to take the postal order away with him but again the man did not answer clearly / Ogawa then asked him if it was possible to be infected with typhoid from simply touching the postal order and again the man was unsure / Ogawa said, ‘Surely we would have had to lick the postal order, or the customer’s hand to become infected?’ / The man agreed and stood up ready to leave / However, the man, looking around the room at the closed vaults, then asked whether or not the bank had already sent the day’s cash deposits to the Central Bank / The man used the same technical terms used by the bank employees to talk about cash deposits and banking practices and procedures / However, before Ogawa could answer, the man bowed deeply, thanked the manager and left the branch / Ogawa described the man as being in his fifties, of medium build, round faced with a scar on his left ch
eek and close-cropped hair / He was wearing a uniform with an armband on which were painted the words: ‘Tokyo Epidemic Prevention Centre’ / Second case reported to Special Investigation HQ today by a Mr Kawasumi, acting manager of the Ebara branch of the Yasuda Bank / Kawasumi reported that on 14 October 1947, a man entered the Ebara branch of the Yasuda Bank at 722 Hiratsuka-machi 3-chōme, Shinagawa-ku and announced himself as a Dr Matsui Shigeru, an official from the Epidemic Prevention Unit of the Welfare Ministry / The man said, / came here with Lieutenant Parker in a jeep because a new typhus case has happened in the houses near the market located behind your bank and that because some of the residents of these houses are customers of the bank it is necessary for me to immunize the employees of the bank against infection.’ / However, Kawasumi was suspicious of this Dr Matsui and so he sent an employee to the local Hiratsuka kōban to ask the officer on duty whether there had been an outbreak of typhoid in the neighbourhood / The officer was called Iida Ryuzo / Officer Iida said he hadn’t heard of any outbreak but that he would check and then come to the bank / Meanwhile the manager agreed to cooperate with the disinfection / This Dr Matsui said he had to collect his equipment from his jeep and went outside / On his return, the man distributed some kind of medicine to all twenty-three employees of the bank / He told the employees it was a preventative medicine for typhus control and directed them to drink it / The medicine was given in two doses / The first dose was described as being the colour of diluted soy sauce with an acrid aftertaste / The second medicine was tasteless and is believed to have been water / Each of the employees drank the doses down but suffered no ill effects / At this point Officer Iida arrived and spoke directly with this Dr Matsui / Officer Iida told this man Matsui that he had been out to the neighbourhood to check and found there had been no outbreak of typhoid / This Dr Matsui told Officer Iida that he must have checked the wrong neighbourhood and suggested that he should go back out to check the correct area / Officer Iida then left the bank to check the area again / But the man did not wait for the officer to return and left a few minutes later / However, Kawasumi has given Special Investigation HQ the name-card the man left behind / ‘Matsui Shigeru; medical doctor; Gikan; Yobō Division; Health & Welfare Ministry’ / A doctor named Matsui Shigeru has already been located in Sendai / Detective Tomitsuka (Bucho Keiji) of the First Investigative Division, has been sent to Sendai to interview Dr Matsui / Officer Iida has also been interviewed this afternoon by Special Investigation HQ and has provided a detailed description of the man / Iida described the man as being in his late forties to early fifties, about 160 centimetres tall, with a mark on his left cheek / Mr Kawasumi also stated that the man did not speak with the Tokyo dialect but with the accent of another region (which he is unable to name) / Because Officer Iida was unable to verify any reports of an outbreak of dysentery in the vicinity, he reported the case to his superior, Detective Meiga / Detective Meiga contacted the Ministry of Health & Welfare and was told that a Dr Matsui Shigeru was attached to their ministry but was posted in Sendai and did not fit the description of the man who visited the Ebara branch of the Yasuda Bank / Meiga and Iida wrote up a brief memo of the case and filed it along with the name-card / No further action was taken at this point / Iida seconded to Special Investigation HQ / Robbery Room detectives removed from ji-dōri teams to form Name-card Investigation Team under Chief Komatsu / 19.30: Emergency meeting ends / Officers told to report for second meeting of their ji-dōri questioning teams / Each pair of detectives gives their report of their day’s work / No substantial leads reported / Officers told to write up all statements given / Officers told to continue questioning of their assigned neighbourhood tomorrow with emphasis on description of the suspect / Objections raised by Fukushi and me / Waste of time / Told to shut up and do our jobs.